The reliance in psychology on verbal definitions means that psychological research is unusually moored to how humans think and communicate about categories. Psychological concepts (e.g., intelligence, attention) are easily assumed to represent objective, definable categories with an underlying essence. Like the “vital forces” previously thought to animate life, these assumed essences can create an illusion of understanding. By synthesizing a wide range of research lines from cognitive, clinical, and biological psychology and neuroscience, we describe a pervasive tendency across psychological science to assume that essences explain phenomena. Labeling a complex phenomenon can appear as theoretical progress before there is sufficient evidence that the described category has a definable essence or known boundary conditions. Category labels can further undermine progress by masking contingent and contextual relationships and obscuring the need to specify mechanisms. Finally, we highlight examples of promising methods that circumvent the lure of essences and suggest four concrete strategies for identifying and avoiding essentialist intuitions in theory development.

心理学对语言定义的依赖意味着心理学研究异常依赖于人类如何思考和交流类别。很容易假设心理学概念（例如，智力、注意力）代表具有潜在本质的客观、可定义的类别。就像以前被认为能够激发生命的“生命力”一样，这些假定的本质可以创造一种理解错觉。通过综合来自认知、临床和生物心理学和神经科学的广泛研究路线，我们描述了心理科学中普遍存在的趋势，即假设本质可以解释现象。在有足够的证据表明所描述的类别具有可定义的本质或已知的边界条件之前，对复杂现象进行标记可能会出现理论进展。类别标签可以通过掩盖或有和上下文关系并掩盖指定机制的需要而进一步破坏进展。最后，我们强调了绕过本质诱惑的有希望的方法的例子，并提出了四种具体的策略来识别和避免理论发展中的本质主义直觉。